Branding has become one of the most powerful tools in marketing strategy.

There has
been a general agreement among academics and practitioners that places can be branded
in the same way as consumer goods and services. Destination branding is a relatively new
concept, however, and there is a lack of empirical academic research on the topic. This
exploratory study uses the de Chernatony Brand Box Model and applies it to countries,
regions and cities. The study was developed in order to understand and clarify whether
the same branding techniques should be applied to these three different types of places.
The results point to differences between countries when compared with regions and
cities. Countries are so functionally diverse they should leverage the emotive or
representational parts of their brand identity, while regions and cities, being smaller in
scale, should leverage their more functional facets. It seems that regions have more in
common with cities from a branding point of view, and this has implications for branding
strategies for all three types of tourist destinations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]